The window overlooks a neglected backyard where a few shrubs grow with their backs to the wall. Under the washing lines, grasses heavy with seed pods all incline slightly southward, and among the grasses a lone yellow plant, maybe a ragwort.
It’s evening. From time to time the grasses move in the breeze. Now a feather comes wafting down, a pigeon or a herring gull’s. It’s cloud-gray, as though plucked from a cloud.
Don't You Forget About Me is a deep dive into memory — specifically, what the main character, Georgina Horspool, chooses to remember and decides to forget, and how secrets buried in those memories can ravage a young woman's self-esteem and lead her to misjudge those who care about her the most.
Weighty stuff, huh?
But Mhairi McFarlane's fifth novel has plenty of laugh-out-loud scenes, too, and she consistently serves up a heaping plate of humor alongside each bowl of angst. Georgina's story is a delightful yet cautionary tale about the misadventures of a willful, insecure, 30-year-old who feels she needs to "make something of herself." But the obstacles in her path are piled so high, she might need a fleet of trucks to clear the way.
Although the tales are divided between five translators (Sondra Silverston, Nathan Englander, Jessica Cohen, Miriam Shlesinger and Yardenne Greenspan), each captures Keret’s dry, almost clinical style superbly. The book shows a master of the short story pushing against the limits of what the form can achieve.
In Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream, Nicholas Lemann, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and dean emeritus at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, offers his own take. His theory, as he writes in his introduction, is that the loss of the American dream occurred because of "our move from an institution-oriented to a transaction-oriented society," which meant concentrating power in the financial sector and away from government and larger corporations. This, he says, led to, among other things, a decline in union power, a reduction in long-term employment, banking tricks like subprime mortgages, and the financial instruments those subprime mortgages were packaged in, which led in turn to the financial crash in 2007.
For people who have read The Big Short by Michael Lewis, watched the film based on it directed by Adam McKay, or otherwise paid attention to how and why the economy cratered a little more than 10 years ago, many of these broad strokes will seem familiar. Transaction Man seeks to put the turn that led us there into context and take a look at where things have gone since.
has a white shade and a pale green base
with milky blossoms
down the front in a single spray,
almost Japanese,